Fourteen million people live in poverty in the UK, more than one in five of the population and people already struggling face a ‘poverty premium’, often having to pay more for essential services than those who are better off.
On average, as prepayment customers, they pay £317 a year more for electricity and gas than credit customers.
SMARTprepay® has been developed by GLOBAL-365 to help the 5 million people who currently live in fuel poverty in the UK to escape this. GLOBAL-365 requires energy suppliers using SMARTprepay® to offer their prepayment customers
price parity with their credit customers.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has recognised GLOBAL-365’s contribution to social justice, stating:
“Decreasing the cost of pre-payments for gas, electricity and heating and in doing so simplifying the process and methods of making top-ups, SMARTprepay® is the first system with the technology and sophistication to finally offer price parity between prepayment and credit customers.”
In practice SMARTprepay® is becoming the energy supply industry’s equivalent of the grocery supply industry’s ‘Fairtrade’ initiative.
